Derek Ide, Ph.D.

Historian, Educator, Visiting Assistant Professor at GVSU

ABOUT

Derek Ide is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Grand Valley State University. Before joining GVSU, he was an IHP / ARC-NCID Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, as well as a Visiting Instructor of History at Miami University (Regionals). Derek received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Houston in 2023, where he was a College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences Dissertation Fellow.

As a historian, Derek’s primary research is focused on anticolonial and internationalist movements challenging imperialism in the 20th century. His current book, Ghosts of Bandung: Black Internationalism and the Palestinian Revolution during the Cold War (under contract with University of California Press), analyzes the internationalist commitments that bound Black radicals and Palestinian revolutionaries together in their quest for liberation. It further explores how those commitments were encouraged, shaped, and sometimes even limited by various centers of anticolonial activity during the Cold War. Before his dissertation work at the University of Houston, Derek wrote a master’s thesis on the role of the Egyptian communist movement under Gamal abd al-Nasser at the University of Toledo.

His work has appeared in a variety of places and languages, including Jacobin, the Lebanese journal Al-Adab (Italian translation here), the Institut du monde arabe‘s annual series Araborama, and in the International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflict. He has also published in the Black Agenda Report, Popdust, ZNet, and the Hampton Institute, among other places. He has presented his research in diverse forums, including the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the Freie Universität Berlin, and the New Directions in Palestinian Studies at Brown University.

Derek grew up in a working class family in Toledo, Ohio. He has dedicated his life to education — his first job was teaching martial arts at age 14, which he did for nearly a decade. He has taught in high schools, and served as an ESL teacher to students in Gwangju and Busan, South Korea. At the university level, has taught history at Grand Valley State, the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Miami University, the University of Houston, and the University of Toledo. He is particularly proud of the work his students do, as well as his teaching evaluations across various institutions. In 2019, he was the recipient of UH’s Teaching Excellence Award, for which he was nominated by students and faculty. When not researching, writing, or teaching, you’ll likely find Derek in the gym or exploring a new place to eat!

FEATURED WORKS

“The US Cheered on Suharto’s Massacres in Indonesia” (CONEFO), Jacobin